Declan Hayes
As Cardinal Richelieu and the Three Musketeers might have said regarding the changing of the woke guard, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
If MAGA President Trump is looking to get his woke wars back on track, he could do worse than listen to Russian spokesperson Maria Zakharova's wise words on Auschwitz, or read the always excellent Hélène de Lauzon's excellent toutes pour une article on the transformation of Alexandre Dumas' swashbuckling masterpiece, The Three Musketeers, into a diatribe adulating obese lesbian feminists gorging themselves on behalf of a phantom French Queen.
The key commonality with both of those is, as Zakharova asserts, that the liberal intelligentsia, historians and political scientists in these instances, are yielding to "distorted political correctness popular in the West." Although linking The Three Musketeers to Auschwitz might look like a stretch, as Cardinal Richelieu, the founder of modern France, is painted as the master villain of the piece, rewiring Dumas' thriller aims to further undermine France just as rewiring Auschwitz aims to undermine Russia, its armed forces and all connected to them.
Although NATO have plenty of Francophobic and Russophobic form in all this, the other notable thing about both of those events is that no historian or social scientist is up in arms about them. They are, at best, collaborators in this woke transformation and it will take more than Trump's huffing, bluffing and puffing to dislodge those primary culprits from their sinecured perches.
Although Trump did prune back the diversity, equality and inclusion charlatans, he will find it much tougher to take an axe to their academic and religious roots. Take, for example, Trump's inauguration where he, his missus, the Obamas, the Clintons and hundreds of others had to sit through a diatribe by Mariann Edgar Budde, an LGBT fanatic and self-styled archbishop in the self-styled Episcopal Church (the American branch of King Charles' Anglican cult). Why was that ecclesiastical yob given the "inclusive" gig when her cult is smaller than even the Mormons, and why was it not given to America's much larger Catholic or Baptist faiths instead? Until gerrymanders like that, and bull frogs like Mariann Edgar Budde, who directly profit from them, are done away with, America will stay emasculated, contemptible and woke.
But even targeting charlatans like Budde does not really get to the nub of the matter. Why is Trump's (and Elon Musk's) alma mater, the Wharton School of Business, that Trump never shuts up about, charging a staggering $118,000 a year for America's wokest and most useless DEI degree, and why will many of Barron Trump's contemporaries waste their money by "studying" such garbage? Let me put the Trumps and Musk straight on that. Universities sell what they have, DEI garbage in this case, and not what the market wants. When Barron graduates, which he will unless his professors fancy being transferred to Greenland, he will probably knock off an MBA to just give him a few more letters after his name. But Barron, through his father, has all the contacts he might ever need and so he will not be dependent on whatever Ivy League college nets him after Stern (which is squandering a fortune working toward diversity and inclusion) is done with him. Not so tens of thousands of others, who go to College to get a leg up, not to be drowned in the pottage of DEI nonsense that Trump's Wharton School, Barron's Stern School and a thousand others palm them off with.
These various schools and universities are not autonomous. They work together for their own greater good. Take the Jesuits' Georgetown as an example. Having got fat from the GI Bill, which was a life saver for hundreds of second rate American Colleges, it is now not only a major hub for the Hillary Clintons, Madeleine Albrights and Condoleezza Rices of the Beltway, but most of its students regard those war criminals as heroes. If Trump really believes ghouls like them have America's best interests at heart, he should go back to his day time job as a reality TV presenter.
Even leaving my own considerable experience of the Jesuits' woke kiddy fiddling to one side, the following links show that the Pope, the Jesuits' Fordham and the Jesuits' Georgetown are not only obsessed with the woke agenda, but are determined to pass their nonsense on to tomorrow's priests and gullible students. Trump would do the faithful a big favour if he sanctioned all three.
Given Trump's advanced years, that is unlikely. What he should instead do is penalise and sanction so heavily rogue leopards like the Wharton Business School that they will be forced to change their spots. America, and the rest of the world, does not need to be told barefaced lies about Auschwitz or Cardinal Richelieu's foundation of modern France. It certainly does not need the Wharton School and a thousand of its clones running fake DEI courses for fake people, who figure Hillary Clinton or one of her equally fake clones will fix them up with a job on Easy Street. America needs more STEM courses in physics, engineering and the hard sciences and less courses and faculties in religion, philosophy, peace studies (don't laugh) and, especially, sociology, which worms its cancerous way into every cash making course under heaven.
But then, even Trump's hands are totally tied by America's woke nonsense. If we look beyond this Fox News report telling us that pro Palestinian students have been sanctioned for their pro-Gaza activities, we can easily see Zionist wokeism at work there. Though, to my mind, at least, I think it good that students are concerned with the Gazan turkey shoot, I find it contemptible that Chinese student Liu Lijun has had her student visa revoked for doing the right thing at UCLA over Gaza, and I sincerely hope that some Chinese, Russian or other university in the civilised world will do the right thing by her.
In the meantime, Musk tweets that Pete Hegseth, Trump's Defence Secretary, has evicted the New York Times, NPR, NBC, and Politico from their Pentagon perches to make room for One America News Network, the New York Post, Breitbart News Network, and HuffPost. As Cardinal Richelieu and the Three Musketeers might have said regarding this changing of the woke guard, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.